The sale of ice-creams was unknown in the streets until last summer, and was first introduced, as a matter of speculation, by a man who was acquainted with the confectionary business, and who purchased his ices of a confectioner in Holborn. He resold these luxuries daily to street-sellers, sometimes to twenty of them, but more frequently to twelve. The sale, however, was not remunerative, and had it not been generally united with other things, such as ginger-beer, could not have been carried on as a means of subsistence. The supplier of the street-traders sometimes went himself, and sometimes sent another to sell ice-cream in Greenwich Park on fine summer days, but the sale was sometimes insufficient to pay his railway expenses. After three or four weeks’ trial, this man abandoned the trade, and soon afterwards emigrated to America.
Not many weeks subsequent to “the first start,” I was informed, the trade was entered into by a street-seller in Petticoat-lane, who had become possessed, it was said, of Masters’s Freezing Apparatus. He did not vend the ices himself for more than two or three weeks, and moreover confined his sale to Sunday mornings; after a while he employed himself for a short time in making ices for four or five street-sellers, some of whom looked upon the preparation as a wonderful discovery of his own, and he then discontinued the trade.
There were many difficulties attending the introduction of ices into street-traffic. The buyers had but a confused notion how the ice was to be swallowed. The trade, therefore, spread only very gradually, but some of the more enterprising sellers purchased stale ices from the confectioners. So little, however, were the street-people skilled in the trade, that a confectioner told me they sometimes offered ice to their customers in the streets, and could supply only water! Ices were sold by the street-vendors generally at 1d. each, and the trade left them a profit of 4d. in 1s., when they served them “without waste,” and some of the sellers contrived, by giving smaller modicums, to enhance the 4d. into 5d.; the profit, however, was sometimes what is expressively called “nil.” Cent. per cent.—the favourite and simple rate known in the streets as “half-profits” was rarely attained.
From a street-dealer I received the following account:—
“Yes, sir, I mind very well the first time as I ever sold ices. I don’t think they’ll ever take greatly in the streets, but there’s no saying. Lord! how I’ve seen the people splutter when they’ve tasted them for the first time. I did as much myself. They get among the teeth and make you feel as if you tooth-ached all over. I sold mostly strawberry ices. I haven’t an idee how they’re made, but it’s a most wonderful thing in summer—freezing fruits in that way. One young Irish fellow—I think from his look and cap he was a printer’s or stationer’s boy—he bought an ice of me, and when he had scraped it all together with the spoon, he made a pull at it as if he was a drinking beer. In course it was all among his teeth in less than no time, and he stood like a stattey for a instant, and then he roared out,—‘Jasus! I’m kilt. The could shivers is on to me!’ But I said, ‘O, you’re all right, you are;’ and he says, ‘What d’you mane, you horrid horn,[8] by selling such stuff as that. An’ you must have the money first, bad scran to the likes o’ you!’
“The persons what enjoyed their ices most,” the man went on, “was, I think, servant maids that gulped them on the sly. Pr’aps they’d been used, some on ’em, to get a taste of ices on the sly before, in their services. We sees a many dodges in the streets, sir—a many. I knew one smart servant maid, treated to an ice by her young man—they seemed as if they was keeping company—and he soon was stamping, with the ice among his teeth, but she knew how to take hern, put the spoon right into the middle of her mouth, and when she’d had a clean swallow she says: ‘O, Joseph, why didn’t you ask me to tell you how to eat your ice?’ The conceit of sarvant gals is ridiculous. Don’t you think so, sir? But it goes out of them when they gets married and has to think of how to get broth before how to eat ices. One hot day, about eleven, a thin tall gentleman, not very young, threw down 1d. to me, and says, says he, ‘As much ice as you can make for that.’ He knew how to take it. When he’d done, he says, says he, ‘By G—, my good feller, you’ve saved my life. I’ve been keeping it up all night, and I was dying of a burnt-up throat, after a snooze, and had only 1d. So sick and hot was my stomach, I could have knelt down and taken a pull at the Thames’—we was near it at the time—‘You’ve saved my life, and I’ll see you again.’ But I’ve never see’d him since. He was a gentleman, I think. He was in black, and wore a big black and gold ring—only one.
“The rest of my customers for ices, was people that bought out of curiosity, and there was gentlemen’s servants among ’em, very little fellows some of ’em; and doctors’ boys; and mechanics as was young and seemed of a smartish sort; and boys that seemed like schoolboys; and a few women of the town,—but mine’s not much of a pitch for them.”
From the information I obtained, I may state that, if the sale of street ices be calculated at twenty persons taking, not earning, 1s. 6d. daily for four weeks, it is as near the mark as possible. This gives an expenditure of 42l. in street ices, with a profit to the vendors of from 10 to 25 per cent. I am told that an unsuccessful start has characterised other street trades—rhubarb for instance, both in the streets and markets—which have been afterwards successful and remunerative.
For capital in the ice trade a small sum was necessary, as the vendors had all stalls and sold other commodities, except the “original street ice man,” who was not a regular street trader, but a speculator. A jar—in which the ices were neither sufficiently covered nor kept cooled, though it was often placed in a vessel or “cooler,” containing cold water—cost 1s., three cups, 3d. (or three glasses, 1s.), and three spoons, 3d., with 2s. stock-money; the total is, presuming glasses were used, 4s., or, with a vessel for water, 5s.